Topic: Designer Cryptocurrencies (Read 857 times)

I am deliberately not entering this post on 'alternate cryptocurrencies'
because the intent is very much to support the 'real' Bitcoin
(and the various alternate cryptocurrencies mostly smell of scams to
me.)  I consider the solution set I propose to both reduce the
needless burdon on Bitcoin (which may or may not
gracefully scale to it's theorized potential), and provide a
much more flexible and suitable end user experiance.

In a nutshell, I propose a variety of different 'designer' currencies
with various combinations of the good ideas tuned to a particular
goal.  Generally a part of the 'base value' of these currencies
will be BTC pledged as backing.  This 'backing' could lend
immediate legitimacy to a new currency, and provide holders a BTC
a way to leverage their 'investment' to a good cause.

One of the problems I see are that there are plenty of instances
where a property is specifically and legitimately desirable for
some situations and a specifically not desirable for others.
Some examples:

 - infaltionary, deflationary, or stablized.
 - anonymity -> pseudo-anonmity -> transparency.
 - cycle rate (10-min/block, etc.)
 - charge-back capable or not.
 - cpu capable generation.

For illustrative purposes, I will elaborate on an idea for
dealing with chargebacks.  This is one of the things that is
of interest to me because it limits greatly how much I as a
potential consumer am willing to use Bitcoin as a currency.

A transaction could have a 'clawback' flag.  The potential to
claw-back could decrease over time, and doing so could serve
some useful benefit for the currency.  For instance, clawing
back a transaction could entail doing a certain amount of useful
work in securing the system.  If a user choose to use a specific
account (abaondoning pseudo-anonymity), a counterparty could
choose to either transact or not transact with another based on
their history of performing claw-backs.

One more illustrative example.  This has to do with 'redeaming'
a given designer currency for it's BTC backing.

The rules of the designer currency might be such that the
currency can be redeamed for it's BTC backing under some
condition like that the redeamer must mine an equal amount of
new BTC currency as well.  This would both strengthen the 'real'
Bitcoin system (which would be of value to those holding the
backing currency) and would limit the rate at which people could
cash out (thus insulating the base funders from flash collapse
type scenarios.)

Anyway, the goal of this note is just to introduce this idea
(which I suspect is not entirely novel.)  I will be quite
honest in saying that I hope it takes off in part because I now
hold a decent amount of BTC and it could be of benefit to me
personally.  I do believe, however, that an even bigger goal of
mine is to see crypto-currencies generally work well for all
people, and I think that a structure such as I've described
could play a part in this.